But isn't Ray also a 1st-hand witness of several close encounters? That would make him a more important investigator than those for who the hunt of UFOs is merely an intellectual pastime, wouldn't it?... And if Ray ever decides the timing is finally right & releases whatever it is he has, it's probable that his evidence will strengthen the argument in favor of the non-human nature of the phenomenon --NOT prove it once & for all.
YES. Good call. Ray has had a number of sighting experiences—many later encounters filmed w/ super 8mm. Here are some excerpts from the unpublished biography/interview I recorded in 2004:
Chris: In November 1954 your first close-encounter-type event occurred on Padre Island. Could you talk about that event and give some background?
Ray: I’m unsure how close the encounter was, because we are unsure of the distance of the object’s closest approach, but I will summarize the encounter: We had formed the Corpus Christi Flying Saucer Research Society and we learned that there was a [flying saucer] group or club in Brownsville [TX]. We made contact with them and they invited us down [to meet with them]. So, John McCoy and I went there and got together with the group and decided to go to Padre Island that night to watch for UFOs. My twin brother, who hadn’t been present during my earlier sightings, wasn’t into this and just couldn’t bring himself to believe UFOs existed, so he didn’t go with us, but after the experience that night, he changed his mind. It was rather cold, being on November 6th (1954). There were eight of us and, later-on three police officers came along and also witnessed the domed, disc-shaped UFO, making a total of eleven witnesses.
Before the officers arrived on the scene, the first thing that happened was that what looked like a big ball of white cotton candy -- extremely brilliant -- shot across the horizon in the east (over the Gulf of Mexico, heading south-to-north, going in what appeared to be a sine wave (up and down) path, as it went along from right-to-left. This type path is a characteristic thing that people report in UFO sightings that I now interpret as likely being a field effect rather than sloppy servo-mechanical trajectory control. [chuckles] It was extremely exciting to us! I’d have to go back and check my field notes but I think I had a premonition of something like this. We decided it couldn’t have been a meteor, because it was on a horizontal zig-zag path. Meteors don’t travel that way.
We had all read George Adamski’s first book which had come out in October the year before, ’53, and I think we decided since Adamski had implied some telepathy was involved in his supposed contacts, that my possible premonition might have been telepathy, but I certainly no longer interpret it that way. There was simply a premonition, and what was seen was exactly how I described it.
Ray, it’s well known you are graced with heightened abilities of awareness . . .
. . . I’ll have to blame that on my grandmother. She didn’t even know the word psychic but the woman was quite amazing. I’m afraid I inherited such abilities but I think in those early days, I was inclined to take natural precognition--maybe of UFOs going to be in an area, or premonition of what a UFO might look like, and misinterpret them as telepathic messages from extraterrestrials. I don’t think I recognized the extent of my intuitive abilities and therefore... There was one or maybe two UFO experiences that I can think of, off-hand, that certainly (at the time) convinced us that temporarily such abilities in us were increased as a result of those UFO encounters.
Was one of them the November 6th 1954 event?
No, that involved the orange-glowing domed disc that was the next thing that came [into view over the Gulf of Mexico] after the ball of brilliant, glowing cotton candy, going on a zig-zag.
The orange-glowing disc approached us and then stopped when a state police car with State Highway patrolman Don Hoyd, his father Ray Hoyd (a deputy sheriff), and deputy sheriff Steve Woods drove up to us on the beach that night in a state highway patrol car. [my italics]
So they actually saw the object? How far away was it from their vantage point?
Oh yes, they clearly saw the object. It’s hard to say how far away it was because we really don’t know how large the object was. It had been approaching us from out over the Gulf of Mexico, but had stopped and hovered when the officers had driven up. Then, after they watched it rather nervously for a while, one the officer, I forget which one -- it’s been so many years -- said he really wanted to get the “heck out of there.” And they did. But later we contacted them
and obtained signed affidavits from all three testifying to what they in fact had seen. In both [Ray's first book] Look Up
and in FATE
Magazine, I published not only the affidavits, but a photograph of the state highway patrolman, Don Hoyd, and of his deputy sheriff father, Ray Hoyd, handing me their signed affidavit attesting to what they saw. [my italics]
Later on as the object ascended and was lost into the sky above us, we headed back toward Brownsville but it, or a different object -- I don’t know which -- came back and zoomed directly overhead, paralleling the street we were on. Although we couldn’t see any dome at that time, the object was glowing just like the notorious green fireball -- a ‘Kelly’, pure, brilliant green. In fact it was so bright, all the white houses down that Brownsville street became temporarily green as it passed over. That was the end of the November 6, 1954, experience, but I can’t say there was anything in the way of heightening ESP [as a result]. That happened dramatically, however, on the encounter we had on Sunday night, October 21, 1956.
It was not on Padre Island but on the salt flats NE of Brownsville maybe half-way between Port Isabel and Brownsville, Texas, a little east of the Port of Brownsville. This actually involved a landing at close range—about 175 feet from us. It circled us for quite some time and excited animal reactions of water birds. It sure excited us! It twice passed within six feet, maybe four feet above our heads. Its diameter was maybe forty feet, and I’d describe it as an ovate spheroid or flattened sphere, glowing a pulsating kind of bluish light. The object pulsed a two-component sound that pulsed precisely with the pulsing surface light.
There was one audible component that sounded like what might occur if you could cover a huge surface with needles and have electrostatic charge passing through those needles into the air in a way it builds up to a maximum potential and then drops back down and builds up again. A kind of a sizzling, an electrical sizzle, but in loud-to-soft, soft-to-loud pulses. A large-scale multi-component-type of thing. Along with that, in the same pulse phase, there was a kind of electric generator hum, but it was pulsed—I’d guess after this long a time that it was maybe in six-second cycles. The intensity of the sound was at a level that enabled you to hear it once the object approached within about eighty feet or so. [He makes a warbling sound]
[chuckles] Ray, the sound you made simulating the object seems like one of those old spooky science-fiction movie soundtracks. Like an early '50s synthesizer sound.
Yep, it was kind of like that, but not exactly. This was a much richer, more multi-component sound. Even more dramatic than the sound was the fact that once the object got about 80 feet [away] from us, for some reason or another we could not move! It’s not as if we thought our bodies were stiff, we just could not move. I guess you could say we couldn’t think ourselves to move. It was weird, yet I don’t think this was fear or shock. It began coming right across over our heads four to six feet above [us] and you could feel as these pulses occurred, our hair would stand on end. As the pulse became louder, our hair would stand up maximally, as if we had our hands on a Van de Graff electrostatic generator. Then as the pulsed died down in sound, our hair would kind of lie down. Then it would come back up and down and come back up . . It was absolutely bizarre and you can imagine four kids in their late teens standing there with this thing passing over our heads.
What was the duration of this particular event where you were in such close proximity to this object?
I would say it was (when the UFO was there in visual range) maybe a half an hour or maybe somewhat less, we were so excited. It circled around us quite a number of times before it actually landed. It was so astonishing. The thing passed over the north side of us, over an area of brackish water, about 300 to 400 feet from us. At that time I remember a quote from Galileo (Or, was it someone else?), something to effect, ‘I wonder if some day men of our world shall stand face to face with living beings from somewhere among the stars…’. This kept going through my mind.
I’m looking at this thing and it’s only 300 to 400 feet away, maybe 20 above the ground and I’m realizing that in moments or in minutes we might have the experience of which Galileo (or whomever) dreamed! It was completely overwhelming and my legs collapsed from under me and I fell down. It wasn’t a faint, I just fell down. Funny thing was I didn’t know this had happened to my twin brother. Years later, when he was telling a mutual friend of ours [the story] his legs, he said, had collapsed under him—just like mine did! That was the first time I’d known it. That’s how little attention I was paying to what was happening to the others.
Who else was there besides the three of you?
John McCoy, Rex, and myself, from Corpus Christi, and Douglas Sharon from Toronto, Canada. Last I heard he was with a museum in California—into archaeology. The last time I saw him was in 1957 in Peru.
What happened then?
After it landed, Douglas wanted us to go up to it He said ‘they’ wanted us to go over there to the landed object. We had a clear-cut agreement we had made on the way down to Brownsville, because I had a strong impression that if we would go down to the salt flats we would encounter a UFO and it might land. The agreement was that if we saw an object land, unless we saw a human-looking person without obvious protective clothing, standing outside it, we would not approach the object too closely. I think it was purely premonition on my part, although I didn’t interpret it that way at that time, I interpreted it as a telepathic message that a landing could occur. But Doug told us we were supposed to go up to the landed object. “They want us to come there!” he kept insisting, and he started to go, but John and I grabbed him. I said, “Doug, you’re not going, it could be dangerous.” I felt that object might be somehow dangerous with radiation and worried about what kind of being or thing could come out of that seemingly alien vehicle, sitting there--either just above the ground or right on the ground. As we held onto Doug, finally---there was no warning—the thing took off in a fraction of a second. It went from ground level into the stratosphere and left a glowing column of ions all the way up, in one second or probably less! That’s how fast this thing left, yet there was never any blast of air that hit us; we never heard any sound or shock wave. It was 175 feet from us and it was gone in a virtual instant!
Then Doug said “You made them leave, they’re upset with us because we didn’t go up there to the craft.” John said something to the effect of, “Maybe we can send them a telepathic message and get them back here.” I don’t know where John got an idea that sounds kind of kooky, but he suggested the four of us join hands in a circle and visualize a ‘white light’ swirling around us clockwise--as seen from above, with that light visualized as expanding out throughout the universe telling whoever had been there a few minutes before, (possibly waiting for us to approach) that, “We’re sorry, please come back.”
So we were standing there in the circle concentrating on this light spinning around, spreading out into the universe, and the thing came back! It came out of the south-south/east and approached us. I had become so excited before this happened, I had gotten a tension neck-ache, but when this thing got within eighty feet of us my neck-ache was gone! I wouldn’t call it ‘a healing’ because as soon as the thing was eighty feet on the other side, the neck-ache came back. We had begun to hear that two component sound which I described, when simultaneously we were paralyzed while just standing there. We could breathe (an autonomic function), but we seemed incapable of voluntary motions!
Well the object went on over us horizontally, moving into the north-north/west and then it climbed up into the sky and was gone. The neck-ache had gotten really bad, so I had to lie down in the back seat of the car because of the pain. So, John, Doug, and Rex were sitting in the front seat of the car.
All of a sudden this thing came back on almost the same course it had taken before, but that time it passed right over the car we were in. We were also paralyzed at that time—even though we were in a metal car. The object went on back up into the sky and was gone. We never had any other encounters with it at all that night that we were aware of. [END of excerpt]
